Gather round, kids. I’m here to tell you a chilling tale—a tale in two parts of a girl who was scared of hormonal birth control.
Maybe you’ve been on hormonal birth control before. Maybe you’re on it now. You may even be taking it for reasons other than baby prevention—regulating your period, clearing your skin, fighting ovarian cysts—and in that case, it sounds like it’s a good option for you.
But for the rest of you—those of you on birth control because you need to control some serious birth—let’s take some time to consider the pill.
For some people, the pill is great. There are dozens of different kinds and if you’re lucky, you’ll be hooked up with the variety that keeps your uterus fetus-free without doing much else. If you’re REALLY lucky, you get one that makes your skin extra nice, gets rid of your weird chin hairs, and give you some extra curves where La Senza ads say you should have ’em.
For a lot of people, though, the pill can be a nightmare. Different varieties come with different sets of side effects, and each kind may interact differently with your own natural hormones. This means that for all your efforts to use your reproductive organs responsibly, you can be rewarded with cramps, mood swings, fun new acne, breast tenderness, changes in sex drive, and weird weight gain/loss. Most doctors recommend that you stay on any particular birth control pill you’re trying out for three months to allow your body to get used to the hormonal adjustments, after which time the side effects will (ideally) level out.
If they don’t, it is back to the drawing board for you and your doctor, and you get to try another variety. This, of course, also means another three months of Side Effects Roulette.
If this isn’t a turn-off enough, there are also people who can’t take the pill due to medical conflicts. Some people are already on specific medications that interact badly with the pill, while others have underlying medical conditions that make it a bad idea too. Your doctor should be able to help you out on this one. I, for one, can’t take any estrogen-based birth control at all without putting myself at risk of serious blood clots, because women in my family have a history of deep-vein thrombosis.
Hormonal birth control, of course, extends way beyond just The Pill in its many forms. We’re very lucky to live in a world where we can choose all kinds of great methods that you don’t have to remember to take every day, and all of them are very effective when used correctly.
You can use the patch, which you can affix to some part of your body for most of the month. Put it on your arm like a nicotine patch. Put it on your stomach. Put it on your butt. Your call, friend.
You can use the NuvaRing, which looks like one of those little jelly bracelets we all had in 2005, but smaller. You store that jelly bracelet in your vagina when you’re not having sex or menstruating.
You can use the implant, which is a little thing about the size and shape of a matchstick that you have inserted into your arm. It stays there for a good long time, and you don’t have to touch it or deal with it at all until it’s time to replace it.
You can get the DepoProvera shot. You have to go in and get this periodically, but it’s a big ol’ dose of hormones a nurse will inject for you so that you don’t have to take your own little doses every day.
You can get the Mirena IUD, which is a little T-shaped metal device that a doctor inserts right on into your uterus after dilating your cervix. It chills in there for five years, and then you have it removed. This has less hormones than other methods, but still involves some.
Those are the big ones. All of the above methods deliver hormones into your body in order to prevent eggs from fertilizing and/or implanting onto your uterine lining. They do this by delivering hormones to your ENTIRE body, which gives them the chance to then royally screw with your entire body.
I don’t mean to be such a pearl-clutcher about hormones here, but listen: some of us have real reasons for concern about them. I suffer from a mood disorder and am medicated already.
While “mood swings” might be a minor side effect for some, the promise of three months or more of an unpredictable mood, for me, could be a death sentence.
For others, factors like a history with disordered eating and body image might make the fear of an unpredictable body weight daunting.
Some of us don’t take this stuff lightly because we can’t afford to.
Even if you don’t have a “good reason,” I hereby give you permission, if you need it, to be skeeved by hormonal birth control. It’s not for everyone, it just isn’t.
Luckily, there are some other options.
Tune in next week as Elaine continues her quest for non-hormonal birth control in part two of this entry.
